by KJ Charles
“No…”
“Well, you had your funny turn then,” Sam pointed out. “But I saw it.”
“You saw Jo touch the door?” Simon repeated. “Let us—”
“Excuse me. May I help you?”
The speaker was an elderly man in the black gown of a verger. He was giving our odd little group a highly doubtful look. I suppose that was not unfair.
“The door,” Simon said. “What is its history?”
“Well, it is a very ancient—”
“The bloody tale,” I suggested, having an inkling where Simon was headed. “The terrible thing of which you prefer not to speak.”
“I prefer not to speak of— That is, we do not encourage such wild fantasy,” the verger said, somewhat ruffled. “It is a sensational myth, nothing more.”
“Go on,” Simon and I said together.
The verger glanced between us, mostly at Simon, and gave up. “I suppose you know that doors such as these were often covered in oxhide. There is a folktale—nothing more, I am positive—that during the old times, one Danish invader was captured by the locals in the act of pillaging the holy sanctuary, and subjected to a most disgusting punishment.”
“Flayed,” Jo whispered. They swayed slightly; Sam took their weight, as if by habit. “They flayed him alive and nailed his skin to the door. Didn’t they? It wasn’t hell I saw, it wasn’t devils. It was people.”
“It frequently is, in my experience,” I said. “Simon, what are you doing?”
“Looking for the remnants of skin.” Simon was peering closely at the door. “I think, here—”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake. It’s cold, let us go.” I herded our little party down the stairs, away from the horrified verger. “There, Jo, are you reassured?”
Jo nodded. “I suppose. Yeah. Feel a bit stupid, to be honest.”
“Not stupid: ill informed,” Simon said. “You have remarkable powers of divination but you must have knowledge if you are not to endanger yourself and others. You cannot go on as you are.”
Jo turned their face away as we walked through the cathedral grounds. “Yeah. I know that. But there’s just me and Sam, and we got to eat somehow. What else can I do?”
Simon looked at the pair, at their worn clothes and patches, and perhaps he thought then of two other children who had huddled together with nobody to turn to. He glanced at me. I nodded.
“Come to London,” he said. “You need a mentor, and my colleague is perhaps one of the best diviners alive. She may be able to teach you. She will certainly find someone who can.”
Jo stopped, under the glow of a gas-lamp. “You mean it?”
“I will take you to her. She will know what to do for the best.”
The look on Jo’s face: hope warring with uncertainty. “I hear you, Mr. Feximal, but, no offence, there’s lots of people want what I can do. And I got Sam to think about, I got to be careful. So let’s have your hand.”
Simon nodded approval and put his hand out once more.
“And you,” Jo told me. “Right hand.”
“Why?” I asked, offering it.
“Because you’re connected.” Fingertips brushed the back of my hand, very lightly, then settled more firmly. “Oh. Oh.”
I glanced at Simon, whose expression was intent, and it occurred to me too late to wonder what this strange youth might see between us.
“I see… I see the stories, and the telling of them. Darkness…no, shadow.” Jo’s voice was vague, abstracted, as though their mind was elsewhere. “Living in the shadows, when the shadows cast the light.” Their eyelids flickered oddly. “Light in shadow, silent words, but they’ll come. And the light comes after. Light on the blue. There will be light…but it’s a way off yet. And there’s a long night coming first.”
We stood in silence a moment longer, before the Seer removed their hands and gave us a rueful half smile. “And what that meant, you tell me. But I reckon I can trust you gentlemen. So I’ll go talk to your colleague—” Sam tugged at their sleeve. “With Sam here, ’cause we go together, and we’ll see what happens. How about that?”
“Good,” Simon said. “I cannot promise what my colleague will say but I can promise you that we will not simply take away your livelihood. You will have a new start, whatever it may be.”
“A new start for a new century,” I added. “And may it be a brighter, better place than the old.”
“Yeah,” Jo said slowly. “Here’s hoping.”
They did not sound quite convinced.
We left the Seer and the urchin in Rochester, with an appointment to come to Fetter Lane in the New Year and a little assistance to cover the cost of the train ticket. Our own train back to London seemed to dawdle endlessly; the streets were crowded with revellers when we returned to the metropolis; and it was close on midnight when at last we lay together in bed.
“Will they come, do you think?” I had been unsure whether we ought to bring the pair with us, just in case.
“Undoubtedly,” Simon said. “Jo’s situation is not a pleasant one. It is an uncomfortable thing to have connections to the world beneath the world, and far more so without support or knowledge. He—she?—will need a mentor.”
“Would Miss Kay do that?”
“For gifts like those?” Simon snorted. “She will mentor, cherish, and fight to the death to prevent someone like Karswell getting hold of that youth.”
She doubtless would. And it seemed probable that Jo needed a protector. Our inflexible, rulebound world was not kind to those who stepped away from man or woman’s allocated position.
“What do you think he—she—damn it, I shall say they—meant about the light?”
Simon shrugged, and pulled me to his broad chest. “I don’t know. If I have learned anything from Theodosia, it is not to live by premonitions. They are too often treacherous. In any case…” He pressed his lips to my forehead. “I need no vague assurances of the future. I am very well here and now.” He trailed the kiss down to my earlobe. “Did you say you were going to dye your hair blue?”
“Something of the sort.”
He exhaled with puzzled amusement. “I suppose it is a new fashion? Well, if you must.”
“You would not object?”
“If it strikes you as a good idea. Blue or brown or grey, it is all the same to me, so long as you are content.”
I rolled over and up so that I straddled his chest, watching his face as the runes flowed under my thighs. “I am content. Extremely. How could I not be? The only way I could be more content is if you, Mr. Feximal, would bestir yourself and see in the new century with me.”
Simon clasped my hips with his warm, strong hands, so firm, with such unconscious ownership that I shivered in his grasp. “I dare say I might do you service. Will you do me one in return?”
“With the greatest pleasure.”
“Don’t dye your hair blue. I like it grey. I like the contrast.”
“With what?”
“It gives you gravity, when you are all levity.”
I contemplated him narrowly. “I could swear that is a joke.”
“Not an original one, I fear.” He looked pleased with himself, nonetheless.
“Still.” I bent to kiss him. “And we had better get on if we are to match your strokes to those of the clock.”
That we did. Simon’s arm round my neck, cradling me, I embracing him; the both of us gasping our pleasure. We clasped each other, close as any pair could be, with soft cries and half-formed words and whispers, rocking together. “This is how to see in the century,” Simon murmured in my ear. “This is how to spend one.”
And as we made love, there was a roar from outside, the sound sweeping along the crowded streets like rolling thunder, and the church bells began to chime all over London.
We brought Jo to live in Fetter Lane—it is a large house and Miss Kay did not wish to lose such a treasure—along with the ubiquitous Sam, who assisted Cornelia with the housework while acquiring an e
ducation. Jo was a delightful and lionhearted young person, and their gifts rapidly became indispensable to our work. Sam was an ordinary, bumptious, rumbustious scapegrace, ever tumbling into scrapes, cheeking Simon and Miss Kay without the slightest fear. (This did them both a great deal of good, in my opinion.) Between the two youngsters, the cold house came alive in a way that I had not imagined possible.
I have written a great deal of our early years; I find I have nothing to add on our later ones. Our working life remained dramatic and dangerous, but Simon and I had reached an equilibrium, a mutual understanding matched with steady, loving contentment. We were scarred, and grey, and we had been through much, but we had been through it side by side and were happy to be so.
I should conclude my story here, with the bells of the new century, and the bright dawn of a hopeful, peaceful future. That is part of the joy of crafting a tale: one may end on the perfect moment and leave it shining in the reader’s memory as the final word.
If I stopped our story here, all would be well forever.
I cannot.
The End
I began this account of my and Simon’s secret life in September 1914, with the world falling into chaos around us. Matters have not improved since. As I write, Russia is in upheaval; the Kaiser’s forces are on the attack. America has joined the fray. God knows when this will end, or how.
Simon and I are soldiers now, of a kind. This may surprise you, since we are both well over recruitment age—Simon will be fifty-six in a few weeks, if we live to see it; his hair honestly greyed by now, his powerful shoulders beginning to stoop a little. Needless to say, we did not volunteer. I am, I hope, a patriot, but I see no love of England in this harvest of her youth. It is a blood sacrifice, no less, and the young men who bravely shoulder guns for England, or indeed Germany, are as much victims as though they were bound to a stone altar in a stinking cellar, with General Haig holding the silver knife.
You will be asking yourself why Simon and I fight this war, then, and I can only answer: Because we were compelled to. The Great Powers on both sides are attempting to leverage influences they ought not touch, of which the summoning at Mons in 1914 was merely the beginning, and every occultist in Europe has been exhorted or extorted to join in raising forces from the world beyond. We were not excused. Representatives of Whitehall came to Simon with requests that turned to orders; Simon refused with increasing ill grace; Sir Ranjit Singh himself visited Fetter Lane to change his mind, and failed.
“You no longer have the luxury of independence, Mr. Feximal,” he warned Simon. “Your country requires your service. Germany has more active occultists in Wittenberg alone than we do in London. There is a war to fight and you are needed.”
“I do not go to war with men,” Simon growled. “Germany is not my enemy.”
“She is now,” Sir Ranjit said. “And I suggest you reconsider while the choice remains your own.”
Simon declined, with finality. Two days later a Whitehall junior came to see us. This time we were informed that the Fat Man had kept records, to which Sir Ranjit had access. The official brought written testimony: from a hotel where we had allowed affection to outstrip discretion; from clubs I have not attended in twenty years; worst of all, a letter that I had written to Simon some ten years back. (I asked him, afterwards, why he had kept words of love and desire that could damn us both when any sensible man would have burned the blasted thing. He replied, “It was the thing you wrote for me.”) He had kept the letter, and someone had stolen it from our home, and now it was waved in our faces with a threat of prosecution for sodomy and the attendant humiliation, shame and gaol.
Simon may be in his fifties but his right arm would still do credit to a man half his age. It did no good, except to relieve his feelings, but at least the Whitehall man went away with a badly broken nose to go with our bitter, reluctant capitulation.
We had packed Jo off in good time. The thought of our brave, fragile Seer used as a crystal ball by some oafish general was unbearable, and Miss Kay removed them before the outbreak of war which, needless to say, Jo had seen coming. Sir Ranjit informed us that it was a treasonous act to deny Britain the use of such powers. Perhaps it was; if so, I cannot regret that I am a traitor.
Sam is serving on the same battle cruiser as Gene Robey. I do not wish to think of that.
So here we are, Simon and I, fighting the hidden war, in which occultists on both sides compete to raise forces against one another, as if there were not enough madness loose in the world. Simon has refused to take an active part in this evil, no matter what the threat, so instead we are stretcher-bearers, conscientious objectors on the front lines of invisible battles, fighting the symptoms because we will not be the cause. We struck down the ghouls of no-man’s land that infested the trenches of Normandy last year. We walk the trenches, among the rats and barbed wire and through the mud, with shells booming around us. The ghosts scream day and night. Simon’s skin is unspeakable; my left hand unusable with the constant, throbbing cold pain. I cannot go more than twenty yards from him now for fear of breaking the cartouche’s connection. I do not want to.
I have seen many dreadful things in my life, but this war is as close to hell as I have ever been. And I think, on the whole, this is the end.
We will do our duty until this insane conflict ends, or until it ends us. Either way, we shall not return to England. I dream of warmth, blue skies and peace, lapping seas, and a lonely cottage a very long way from other people. Somewhere unravaged by war, if such a place still exists in Europe. Somewhere Whitehall will not find us, and the voices of the dead will drop to a whisper, and two ageing gentlemen may share a house in peace, without prying eyes and the threat of shame in a country that makes a fetish of death and a crime of love.
So, then. I shall send my dog-eared bundle of manuscript to my solicitor to be passed to you, and return to my war beneath the war, and when it is over, my name and Simon’s will be listed as either deceased or missing in action, and you will not hear from me again. You may publish this account at such time as the law permits, or destroy it, or do anything in between. It hardly matters now.
But I had to tell the story, Henry. I had to let someone know who I was: not merely Simon’s assistant, his chronicler, his poor scribbling friend, but the great love of a great life. That I may have lived in his shadow, but I was always by his side. That I was as needful to him as air.
Simon kissed me this evening, a snatched kiss in a canvas tent, and said, quite calmly, “I love you.”
“Do you know,” I told him, “it has been twenty-three years and you have never said that before?”
“Have I not?” he asked, slightly surprised. “But you knew.”
“Of course I knew. I have always known.”
“Well, then,” he said, with mild exasperation, and put his arm round my shoulders.
If Fate grants us another twenty-three years, preferably in comfortable retirement, that would be very welcome. But if it ends tonight, as long as we go together, I shall feel entirely satisfied with my lot.
Either way, dear Henry, it has been a pleasure working with you, except for your relentless pedantry on the matter of the Oxford comma.
Yours ever,
Robert Caldwell
Passchendaele
October 1917
A note from the Editor
Simon Feximal and Robert Caldwell were listed as missing in action on the rolls of honour at the end of the Great War. No bodies were found, but then, so many men ended in unmarked graves or shell holes, finding burial only in the mud, or the bellies of scavenging things.
As a matter of record, in the year 1921 Miss Theodosia Kay realised her considerable assets, made over half of her fortune and the Fetter Lane property to the individual known as Jo, and took a steamer to Naples. There she disappeared, quietly and permanently. It is possible that she came to an unfortunate end in that teeming city of thieves, an ageing woman travelling alone as she was. It is equally possible
that she chose a solitary retirement on the Italian coast and felt no need to maintain ties with England.
And, I have sometimes thought, or dreamed, it is possible that Miss Kay vanished with a purpose, and a destination. Some little Mediterranean cottage, perhaps, far from the world’s notice. A place where a bright-eyed gentleman and his older companion might live in ghostless quiet, and spend their days together watching the sunlight on the sea.
Henry Scott
Editor
Acknowledgements
This book exists in large part because I wrote a story, Remnant, with Jordan L. Hawk, to whom I owe huge thanks. In this story, set just after “The Writing on the Wall”, Simon and Robert meet Jordan’s series characters Whyborne and Griffin (to mutual dismay), and Robert provokes Simon out of his fit of chivalry by underhand means.
Remnant is available free from Smashwords and ARe.
The Secret Casebook was written in a spirit of loving homage to the Victorian occult tradition and the pulp fiction it produced. All the following can be found free on Project Gutenberg.
Mr. Karswell, shamelessly appropriated into my service in “The Writing on the Wall”, is the villain in “Casting the Runes” by M.R. James, which you should read right now.
Thomas Carnacki and the Saaamaaa Ritual are the creations of William Hope Hodgson in Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, which is a lot more fun than Robert would have you believe.
Dr. John Silence appears in the short stories of Algernon Blackwood.
The sinister Dr. Nikola features in three novels by Guy Boothby.
The Diogenes Club and the Fat Man who belongs to it are the creations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
Some of the stories in this collection are inspired by British folklore.
The legend of Peter des Roches and King Arthur (“Butterflies”) is a very old one. Peter was real, and his tomb can be seen in Winchester Cathedral. My thanks to Gill Vickery for bringing this to my attention as a delightful children’s story, and my apologies for ruining it.
